FAIR Research Data Management – Planning for FAIR: Introduction to RDM and DMPs

These training materials are part of a five-part course aimed at early career researchers on FAIR Research Data Management (RDM). We share these materials so that research data professionals can reuse them in their instructions or training sessions.
The main theme of this course are the FAIR principles: sharing research data that are Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable.
The FAIR RDM course is intended to be flexible and modular: we invite users to (re)use and adapt those parts that are suitable for their audience.
Sessions 1-3 of this course are aimed at absolute beginners: that is, those who likely have knowledge of research processes in general but are new to research data management and the FAIR principles. Sessions 4-5 are aimed at an intermediate level: those who have completed the first three modules and/or already have some existing knowledge of FAIR RDM.

The training session ‘Planning for FAIR: Introduction to RDM and DMPs’ was piloted in September 2024 as the second session of the ‘FAIR Research Data Management’ 5-session course (beginner and intermediate level). The course was developed and piloted as part of the PATTERN project (https://www.pattern-openresearch.eu/).

In ‘Planning for FAIR: Introduction to RDM and DMPs’ learners are introduced to the reasons for managing research data and are prompted to consider who should do what within a research project in terms of Research Data Management (RDM). There is an introduction to what a Data Management Plan (DMP) is and how to create one, followed by an overview of the research data lifecycle and when to create a DMP. This section closes with a discussion on ‘Data Management Planning: obstacles and incentives?’ What are some of the challenges involved in data management planning? What are some of the benefits?

Following the lecture/discussion component of the session, learners are steered towards some more discipline-specific learning through an exercise on some DMP use cases. They are presented with DMPs in various disciplines and guided to consider how the DMP has been structured, what information has been provided, what do they think is good about the DMP?, what they think could be improved? Is there anything they have learnt from reading this DMP that they will plan to carry into their own research? Finally, there is the project work for this section, where learners continue to apply their knowledge to a project that unifies several sub-areas of FAIR research data management.

Though learners will take away knowledge that is broadly applicable across the disciplines, there is a focus on discipline specific learning through the presentation of use cases in different domain areas; through the exercises; and by offering discipline-specific choices for project work.

Learning Outcomes:
By the end of this session, learners will be able to

1.  Define research data management (RDM) and describe its relevance and benefits

2. Explain why data management planning is a step towards FAIR

3. Describe what a data management plan (DMP) is

4. Paraphrase the general areas covered by a DMP

Project work: 
An important component of these training sessions was project work that was conducted on the Projects platform (https://pattern.projects.directory/), which you will see references to throughout the slideshows in this series. We asked learners to do some exercises that are based on real research projects that produced and archived data some time in the past.  Eight ‘use cases’ were created, and participants chose one that mached their interests to work on for the duration of the course. From the first session onwards, they then worked on these ‘use cases’ in the Projects platform, with regular ‘check ins’ with other learners during the live training sessions. The eight use cases have been uploaded to Zenodo separately.

File overview:
20240910_PATTERN_FAIR_RDM_Session2_Slides: The central slideshow for this 2 hour training session
20240910_FAIR_RDM_Session2_Exercise.docx: Exercise that was completed in groups during the training session
20240910_PATTERN_FAIR_RDM_Session2_SessionPlan: the document that we created to plan and manage the training session, which we believe will be useful for potential reusers of the content

Slideshows are uploaded in .pptx and .pdf format and text documents are uploaded in both .docx and .pdf

Related records:

Session 1: 10.5281/zenodo.15310232

Session 3: 10.5281/zenodo.15310456

Session 4: 10.5281/zenodo.15310506

Session 5: 10.5281/zenodo.15310556

FAIR RDM Use Cases: 10.5281/zenodo.15316306